Norman Geras attempts to show compassion for the Palestinians and fails obviously.
The agony of the war burst into Israeli homes last night as Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, a Palestinian doctor popular on Israeli television, delivered his regular report through tears, telling Channel 10 that three of his daughters and a niece had been killed after an Israeli shell hit his home in Gaza.
“My girls were sitting at home planning their futures, talking, then suddenly they are being shelled,” he said. “All that was ever fired out of our house was love and acts of peace, nothing else, ever.”
The TV broadcast is here. (Thanks: StM.)
The Gaza conflict started on 27th December 2008. Norman posted this on 18th January 2009. During that time hundreds were killed, thousands injured and tens of thousands made homeless yet this is the first mention that Norm has made of any casualities on the Palestinian side. Has Norm gone soft? Has he discovered his humanity? Let’s watch and find out.
So in the studio, the presenters seemed genuinely distressed by the doctor’s anguish, one of them even arranged for help to be dispatched. Since the incident he has been mentioned sympathetically on most Israeli blogs. And there’s even footage from an old documentary showing the doctor hugging an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint. Now, you can call me cynical but I think the only reason Norm showed this is because it shows the Israelis in a good light.
Sadly, there’s more. Presumably, Norm didn’t think it relevent.
A press conference for the doctor was interrupted by several angry protestors with one woman ranting:
Why is he engaging in propaganda? He’s talking against Israel at the Sheba hospital. You should all be ashamed. All my children are serving in Gaza. Who knows what he had at his home? …
What’s wrong with you, have you all gone crazy? … My son is in the paratroopers, who knows what you had inside your home, nobody is talking about that. Nobody is talking. Who knows what kind of weapons were in your house; so what if he’s a doctor? The soldiers knew exactly. They had weapons inside the home, you should be ashamed. I have three soldiers, why are they firing at them? All of you should be ashamed.
Then there was the Israeli “Defense” Force report into the incident. Based on a “preliminary investigation,” an Israeli army representative claimed on January 17 that troops fired on Aboul Aish’s house because “they had come under attack from somewhere in the vicinity of the house; possibly a sniper and the final report claimed that the killing was “reasonable”.
[C]onsidering the constraints of the battle scene, the amount of threats that endangered the force, and the intensity of fighting in the area, the forces’ action and the decision to fire toward the building were reasonable
So basically, if the IDF come under fire from a building, they can then fire at a completely different building and that’s “reasonable”.
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